Главная > Реферат >Остальные работы

Сохрани ссылку на реферат в одной из сетей:

Violence And Television Essay,
Research Paper

Violence and Television

Boink! Boom! Crack! The sounds of the
fight scene rage on. Many have fallen in this particularly bloody
battle. The good guys have taken their losses but struggle on to what
is seemingly a victory. Their aggression is fierce and helps them.
Fires consume the background; men and women lie on the ground in
pain. Even if it weren?t for the bombs, missiles, bullets, etc. that
are flying around, hand-to-hand combat would have got the better of
them. It was a classic battle scene when looking back at it, a true
testament of blood, hell, and gore.

This may sound like a heroic
made-for-TV movie shown only on primetime in the hopes of recruiting
a mature audience. But it is not. In fact, it is just another
Saturday-morning special of GI Joe, ?The Real American Hero,? that I
watched with my brother and cousins. We were religious followers of
the show, tuning in every week to see how Sergeant Slaughter, Duke
and the rest of the gang would handle the likes of King Cobra and his
cronies. GI Joe?s early morning time slot encouraged kids, like us,
to tune in every weekend. While eating our CheeriosTM and Frosted
FlakesTM we got a dose of some real fightin? action, in excess of
fifty violent scenes for the morning: there is more than enough to
fill the appetite. The truth is, violence on television is on every
single day. It takes its toll on society, especially children. The
damage done by violence on television is detrimental and confirmed by
statistics, case studies, and personal experiences.

and gruesome, other times clean and
remote. It is not just the Saturday morning cartoons; clips from
action-adventure series, the nightly news and MTV are interwoven with
violence and extremely mature content. Prime-time programs can
average eight hostile acts per hour; children’s shows four times as
much (Bajpai, 1996, ps. 45-52). To television Programmers, violence
is depicted as a normal, justified response to conflict and threat.
They will encourage identification with the aggressor; domination and
submission, to them, are often equated with pleasure and worth. Yet
numerous researchers have put much time into discovering why children
are so attached by the television and the action that takes place
within it. They prove that it is definitely a major source of violent
behavior in children. Their research proves time and time again that
aggression and television viewing do go hand in hand. The truth about
television violence and children has been shown. Many people and
critics try to ignore it and hope that it will go away. Others do not
even seem to care and try to attack these ideas. However, the facts
are undeniable and all the results point to one conclusion:
Television violence causes children to be violent and the effects can
be life-long.

The effects of the television are
first visible even at the most basic level of life, children and
adolescents. The modern-day extent of viewing by humans, especially
Americans, is astronomical. Children begin to watch television at
very early ages, often when they are newborns. At this time they are
obviously not able to follow along or be influenced by it, but they
are subjected to it nevertheless. This early start will lead most
childhood viewers into a cult-like trance by the time they reach the
age of three. In between breakfast and lunch, playtime and naptime,
class and dinner, all children find a way to watch the tube. The
typical American household has the television set on for more than
seven hours each day and children ages two to eleven spend an average
of twenty-eight hours per week viewing (Murray, 1996, p. 1). Some
research has also estimated that by the time a child or teen of
today?s generation reaches the age of seventy, he will have spent
nearly seven years of his life watching television. That is nearly
ten percent of one?s life lives watching television. That is insane;
to say that you and I will spend years upon years, watching
television. There is so much that people, even we, could do in a
seven-year period. Entire wars can be fought in seven years, college
educations can be attained, millions of people will be born and
millions will die, many things can happen that have more significance
than seven years of television. That is a very large percentage of
time to be doing solely one thing, and the fact that that one thing
is watching television, is very, very unfortunate.

The television, as said before, is a
very influential object. Being worse for children, we see that at the
later stages in life (ie: eighteen and over, approximately adulthood)
most people will not be swayed too much by the hypnotic powers of the
television. This is not to say that it cannot happen, but studies
show that most people are fairly set in their ways, especially
mentally, once they reach adulthood and it takes a lot for them to be
affected. Children, on the other hand, are prime candidates to the
influences of the television. They are the most avid viewers and the
most vulnerable. It is here where most violent tendencies, if any,
are fostered. With the addition of cable television to broadcast
television, a recent survey by the Center for Media and Public
Affairs identified 1,846 violent scenes broadcast and cablecast
between 6 a.m. to midnight on one day in Washington, D.C. The most
violent periods were between 6 to 9 a.m. with 497 violent scenes
(165.7 per hour) and between 2 to 5 p.m. with 609 violent scenes (203
per hour) (Murray, 1996, p. 2). This statistic probably seems quite
outrageous, but it is true and there are numbers even higher than
that on given days.

Two hundred violent scenes per hour
are gaudy numbers, yet the even more baffling but more concealed
truism is the time slots of these major occurrences. The times: 6 to
9 a.m. and 2 to 5 p.m. are the most popular times for child and
adolescent viewers. These are the times in the morning when young
children will watch most avidly and in the afternoon after school
when school-aged children are most attentive to it. This just goes to
show that the children, already established as the most vulnerable,
are also the ones subjected to the most violent scenes. This is a bad
combination and it stimulates bad tendencies and violence in the
children.

Now that the extent to which the
television is being watched has been established, and with some idea
of just how much violence there is on an average day, it is time to
look at an even more telling tale. Yes, we said that children may be
subjected to more than six hundred acts of violence in a three-hour
time period, but who?s to say that these acts are in any way severe?
Well, the truth is that while many acts are subtle in their
appearance, they still have an overwhelming effect over time. This is
not to mention the fact that the major acts of violence add up as
well. By the time a child of today?s world reaches the age of
eighteen he will have witnessed over 8,000 simulated murders on the
television. That is an average of 1.22 murders per day, counted from
birth. What you see here is a repetitive bombardment of violence and
violent material upon children. Seeing this every day gives it the
same effect as eating, or sleeping; it?s nearly habitual, which is a
truly sad state of affairs. Getting into a habit of seeing murders
and violence on television, is an obvious sign that should lead us to
believe that it will influence children in a negative way.

Numbers are easily crunched and
manipulated by both sides of the argument. I see that there are quite
a few numbers involved here in the argument. They are mostly in favor
of violence being a bad influence, making these facts hard to ignore.
Especially when they are as blatant and obvious as they appear.
Statistics, when used responsibly, are perhaps some of the best
insights we have into helping us discover problems and their
solutions. As helpful as they may be, there are still other kinds of
information even as persuasive as statistics. What I have to show now
are case studies. There have been numerous case studies performed
over the past few decades involving children and television. I can
throw out statistics all day at people in the hopes that they will
see that violence on television is bad. While it is effective, my
argument is much like any claim a scientist would make: it is not
truly valid until tested. With this in mind, we see testing the real
influence of violence on television shows that it is dangerously
harmful. For an example, there is a case of a study done by a group
Stein and Friedrich for the Surgeon General?s project in 1972
(Murray, 1996, p. 3). Their study consisted of taking 97 preschool
children and exposing one third of them to a television diet
consisting of Batman and Superman cartoons. The middle third were
exposed to a diet of Mr. Roger?s Neighborhood, while the final third
were exposed to neutral programming (neither antisocial or
pro-social). These children watched over twelve half-hour episodes of
their respective programs over a four-week period. They were then
observed in their classroom and playroom environments. The
psychologists running the study found that the children who watched
the Batman and Superman cartoons were remarkably aggressive and not
very apt to share and interact. While on the other hand, the children
who watched Mr. Roger?s Neighborhood were more social, and more
likely to share and interact. The middle third remained close to the
same as they were before. There are many more studies just like this
previous one, and all of them lead to the same conclusion: violent
television does foster more aggressive and violent behavior in
children.

It feels like just yesterday that I
was sitting down to watch my Saturday morning cartoons on my family
room television. Every Saturday was like clockwork for me. I would
always eat my cereal and toast and then watch my GI Joe and
Transformers. I was so in love with GI Joe, I can remember always
wanting to re-enact the scenes with my plastic toy soldiers.
Explosions, death, and carnage were my rations on Saturday and I
loved every minute of it. In fact, although this is embarrassing, I
still remember to this day getting in trouble at pre-school for
hitting a classmate who took a toy away from a friend of mine. Why?
You might ask. Well, it was because I saw on GI Joe that your
supposed to stick up for your friends and protect them from the enemy
at all costs. So me, being the noble and ?informed? friend that I
was, carried-out the mission and took the heat for my violent
actions. I received timeout for the rest of the day.

This may seem a little preposterous,
or maybe even dumb. Regardless, the truth is that GI Joe partly
formed my identity as a young child and the only reason I was able to
later tell the right from wrong was because I had parents to tell me.
My parents would often try to sit with me and watch a few shows, not
for just their pleasure but rather to tell me what was fake and not
to be repeated. Many children go without the parental supervision
when watching television, and it leads to a lack of knowledge from
determining right from wrong. They eventually forget the real and the
fantasy, the violent and the non-violent. Now do not get me wrong,
there are measures that prove and a few studies that show that with
proper supervision children will not be affected by television
violence.

Case studies are out now that show
children being unaffected by television violence as a whole. I
previously mentioned a study done for a Surgeon General?s Project,
which acknowledged an existence of non-violent cases. When I read
this information, I thought to myself, ?that?s awesome, if children
are not really affected by the television.? Only, I found but one or
two instances of these reports meaning that they were few and very
far between. Leading me to conclude that it was merely wishful
thinking to be able to reverse my study and maybe argue from the
other side.

The amount of studies showing that
violence is a factor in the lives of children is just too large in
number to even compare the reports that oppose it. To be honest, I
have only shared a few statistics and studies with you. I could have
rattled off a thousand; it is just not necessary though. I believe
that you can agree with me when I say that violence on television is
detrimental to the lives of children and that it has a bad influence
upon them. You should agree with me, and if you do not, well I can
not wait to hear about your child in the police blotter.

... watching interesting television serial. Commercials are creative and informative. ... and devoted to local news and events. It is a free paperand ... in science and technology, especially in space research. Our ... borrow something good and useful from each other. 3) ...

ViolenceAnd Pornography Essay, ResearchPaperViolenceand Pornography Pornography — Sex or Subordination ... pornography than mainstream films and network television have ever recognized: fat ... used more often in advertising andtelevision, which has led media ...

Youth ViolenceAndTelevisionEssay, ResearchPaper Youth ViolenceandTelevision Youth Violence Do The Young Ever Listen? ... to television shows a positive relationship between earlier exposure to TV violenceand later ...